The Book of Lost Friends

by Lisa Wingate

  The Bug’s amputated limb has been moved out of the intersection—I do not know by whom—and people politely circumvent my car to reach the horseshoe-shaped drop-off lanes in front of the school.

  Down the sidewalk, the teenage girl, maybe eighth or ninth grade—I’m still not very good at eyeballing kids—has resumed charge of the little crosswalk kid. The red beads on her braids swing back and forth across her color-block shirt as she drags the boy away, her demeanor indicating that she doesn’t consider him worth the trouble, but she knows she’d better get him out of there. She has his books and thermos jumbled in one arm and the mangled lunch box hooked by a middle finger.

  I turn a full circle beside my car, surveying the scene, befuddled by its veneer of normalcy. I tell myself to do what everyone else is doing—move on with the day. Think of all the ways things could be worse. I list them in my head, off and on.

  This is how my teaching career officially begins.

  By fourth period, the mental game of Things could be worse is wearing thin. I’m exhausted. I’m confused. I am effectively talking to the air. My students, who range from seventh to twelfth grade, are uninspired, unhappy, sleepy, grumpy, hungry, borderline belligerent, and, if their body language is any indication, more than ready to take me on. They’ve had teachers like me before—first-year suburban ninnies fresh off the college campuses, attempting to put in five years at a low-income school to have federal student loans forgiven.

  This is another universe from the one I know. I did my student teaching in an upscale high school under the guidance of a master teacher who had the luxury of demanding any sort of curriculum materials she wanted. When I waltzed in halfway through the year, her freshmen were reading Heart of Darkness and writing neat five-paragraph essays about underlying themes and the social relevance of literature. They willingly answered discussion questions and sat up straight in their seats. They knew how to compose a topic sentence.

  By contrast, the ninth graders here look at the classroom copies of Animal Farm with all the interest of children unwrapping a brick under the Christmas tree.

  “What’re we s’posed to do with this?” a girl in fourth period demands, her pert nose scrunching as she peers from a bird’s nest of perm-damaged straw-colored hair. She’s one of eight white kids in an overstuffed class of thirty-nine. Last name Fish. There’s another Fish, a brother or cousin of hers, in the class as well. I’ve already overheard whispers about the Fish family. Swamp rats was the reference. The white kids in this school fall into three categories: swamp rat, hick, or hood, meaning drugs are somehow involved, and that’s usually a generational pattern in the family. I heard two coaches casually filing kids into those categories while sorting their class rolls during the teachers’ meeting. Kids with money or real athletic talent get siphoned to the district’s swanky prep academy over “on the lake,” where the high-dollar houses are. Really troubled kids are shifted to some alternative school I’ve heard only whispers about. Everyone else ends up here.

  In this school, the swamp rats and hicks sit in a cluster on the front left side of the room. It’s some sort of unwritten rule. Kids from the black community take the other side of the room and most of the back. A cluster of assorted nonconformists and other-thans—Native American, Asian, punk rockers, and a nerd or two—occupy the no-man’s-land in the middle.

  These kids intentionally segregate.

  Do they realize it’s 1987?

  “Yeah, what’s this for?” Another girl, last name…G…something…Gibson, echoes the question about the book. She’s of the middle-of-the-room variety—doesn’t quite fit either of the other groups. Not white, not black…multiracial and probably part Native American?

  “It’s a book, Miss Gibson.” I know that sounds snarky as soon as the words leave my mouth. Unprofessional, but I’m only four hours in and near the end of my chain already. “We open the pages. Take in the words.”

  I’m not sure how we’ll make it happen, anyway. I have huge freshmen and sophomore groups, and only one classroom set of thirty copies of Animal Farm. They look to be ancient, the pages yellowed along the edges but the spines stiff, indicating they’ve never been opened. I unearthed them in my musty storage closet yesterday. They smell bad. “See what lessons the story teaches us. What it has to say about the time it was written, but also about us, here in this classroom today.”

  The Gibson kid drags a glittery purple fingernail across the pages, flips through a few, tosses her hair. “Why?”

  My pulse upticks. At least someone has the book open and is talking…to me instead of to the kid at the next desk. Maybe it just takes a little while to get into the groove on the first day. This school isn’t very inspiring, in truth. Cement block walls with peeling gray paint, sagging bookshelves that look like they’ve been here since World War II, and windows covered with some kind of streaky black paint. It feels more like a prison than a place for kids.

  “Well, for one reason, because I want to know what you think. The great thing about literature is that it’s subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences.”

  I’m conscious of a few more heads turning my way, mostly in the center section, nerds and outcasts and other-thans. I’ll take what I can get. Every revolution starts with a spark on dry tinder.

  Someone in the back row lets out a snore-snort. Someone else farts. Kids giggle. Those nearby abandon their books and flee the stench like gazelles. A half dozen boys form a jostling, poking, shoulder-butting group by the coatrack. I order them to sit down, which of course they ignore. Yelling won’t help. I’ve tried it in other classes already.

  “There are no right or wrong answers. Not when it comes to literature.” My voice struggles over the racket.

  “Well, this oughta be easy.” I miss the source of the comment. Somewhere in the back of the room. I stretch upward and try to see.

  “As long as you’ve read the book, there are no wrong answers,” I correct. “As long as you’re thinking about it.”

  “I’m thinkin’ ’bout lunch,” an oversized kid in the annoying pileup says. I cast about for his name from roll call, but all I can remember is something with an R, both first name and last.

  “That’s all you ever think about, Lil’ Ray. Your brain’s wired direct to your stomach.”

  A retaliatory shove answers. Someone jumps on someone else’s back.

  A sweat breaks over my skin.

  Wads of paper fly. More kids get up.

  Someone stumbles backward and falls across a desk, a nerd’s head is grazed by a high-top tennis shoe. The victim yelps.

  The swamp rat girl by the window closes the book, lets her chin bump to her palm, and stares at the blackened glass like she wishes she could pass through it by osmosis.

  “That’s enough!” I yell, but it’s useless.

  Suddenly—I’m not even sure how it happens—Lil’ Ray is on the move, shoving desks aside and heading for the swamp rat section like a man on a mission. The nerds abandon ship. Chairs squeal. A desk topples over and strikes the floor like a cannon shot.

  I hurdle it, land in the center of the room, slide a foot or so on the ancient speckled industrial tile, and end up right in Lil’ Ray’s path. “I said that is enough, young man!” The voice that comes out of me is three octaves lower than usual, guttural, and strangely animalistic. Never mind that it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re five foot three and pixieish; I sound like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. “Get back in your seat. Right now.”

  Lil’ Ray has fire in his eye. His nostrils flare, and a fist twitches upward.

  I’m aware of two things. The classroom has gone deadly silent, and Lil’ Ray smells. Bad. Neither this kid nor his clothes have been washed in a while.

  “Man, siddown,” another boy, a skinny, good-lo
oking kid, says. “You crazy or something? Coach Davis is gonna kill you, if he hears about this.”

  The rage drains from Lil’ Ray’s face like a fever breaking. His arms go slack. The fist loosens, and he rubs his forehead. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I don’t feel so good.” He wobbles for a second, and I’m afraid he’s going down.

  “Take…take your seat.” My hand hovers in the air, as if I might catch him. “It’s seventeen…it’s seventeen minutes until lunch.” I try to collect my thoughts. Do I let this pass? Make an example of Lil’ Ray? Write him up? Send him to the principal’s office? What’s the demerit system at this school?

  Did anyone hear all the noise? I glance toward the door.

  The kids take that as an excuse to depart. They grab backpacks and make a beeline for the exit, tripping over desks and chairs, bouncing off one another. They push, shove, elbow. One student attempts to escape the chaos by using the desktops as stepping-stones.

  If they get out, I’m dead. The singular rule most emphasized during the teachers’ meeting was No kids in the hall during classes without adult supervision. Period. Too much fighting, skipping, smoking, adding graffiti to the walls, and other acts of delinquency, which the weary-looking principal, Mr. Pevoto, left to our imaginations.

  If they are in your classroom, you are responsible for keeping them there.

  I join the stampede. Fortunately, I’m nimble and closer to the exit than most of my students. Only two get loose before I plant myself in the doorway, my arms stretched across the opening. It’s at that point I revisit The Exorcist. My head must be turning 360 degrees on my neck, because I see a pair of boys sprinting away down the hall, laughing and congratulating each other, while at the same time I observe stragglers bumping into the logjam I’ve created at the exit portal. Lil’ Ray is at the front and fairly immovable. At least he’s averse to mowing me down.

  “I said, get back in your seats. Now. We still have…” I glance at the clock. “Fifteen minutes.” Fifteen? I’ll never make it that long with this bunch of miscreants. They are by far the worst of the day, and that’s saying a lot.

  No amount of money is worth this, and certainly not the pittance of a salary the school district has agreed to pay me for being here. I’ll find some other means of repaying my student loans.

  “I’m hungry,” Lil’ Ray complains again.

  “Back to your seat.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “You should eat before you come to school.”

  “Ain’t got nothing in the pintry.” A sheen of sweat covers his coppery skin, and his eyes are weirdly glassy. I’m struck by the sense that I have bigger problems than the stampede. Standing in front of me is a fifteen-year-old who’s desperate in some way, and he expects me to solve the problem.

  “All the rest of you, get in your seats!” I bark out. “Put those desks back where they belong. Plant yourselves in them.”

  The area behind Lil’ Ray slowly clears. Sneaker soles screech. Desks clatter. Chairs scrape the tile. Backpacks drop with muffled thuds.

  I hear a commotion in the science room across the hall. There’s a new teacher over there, too. A girls’ basketball coach, fresh out of college and only about twenty-three, as I recall. I at least have a little more age on my side, having worked my way through undergrad and then piddled along to a master’s degree in literature.

  “Anyone who’s not in a chair in the next sixty seconds owes me a paragraph. In ink. On paper.” Owes me a paragraph was the go-to form of intimidation of Mrs. Hardy, my mentor educator. It’s the English teacher’s version of Drop and give me twenty. Most kids will do almost anything to avoid picking up a pen and writing.

  Lil’ Ray blinks at me, his cherub-cheeked face sagging. “Miz?” The word comes in a hoarse, uncertain whisper.

  “Miss Silva.” I already hate the fact that the kids’ default word for me at this school is a generic Miz, as if I am some random stranger, maybe married, maybe not, and with no last name worth remembering. I have a name. It may be my father’s name and, given our relationship, I have my resentments about it, but still…

  A man-sized hand reaches out, grasps air, stretches farther, closes over my arm. “Miss…I don’t feel so—”

  The next thing I know, Lil’ Ray is slumped against the frame, and we’re going down. I do my best to break the fall as a million things run through my mind. Overexcitement, drugs, an illness, theatrics…

  Lil’ Ray’s eyes moisten. He gives me the terrified look of a toddler lost in the grocery store, searching for his mom.

  “Lil’ Ray, what’s going on?” No response. I turn and shout into the classroom. “Does he have a health problem?”

  No one answers.

  “Are you sick?” We’re nose to nose now.

  “I get hun…gry.”

  “Do you carry medicine? Does the nurse have medicine for you?” Do we even have a school nurse? “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “I don’t…I…jus…get hungry.”

  “When did you eat last?”

  “Lunch yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you have breakfast this morning?”

  “Nothin’ in the pintry.”

  “Why didn’t you have supper last night?”

  Deep creases line his sweat-soaked forehead. He blinks at me, blinks again. “Nothin’ in the pintry.”

  My mind speeds full throttle into the brick wall of reality. I don’t even have time to put on the brakes and soften the impact. Pintry…pintry…

  Pantry.

  Nothing in the pantry.

  I feel sick.

  Meanwhile, behind me, the noise level is rising again. A pencil takes flight and hits the wall. I hear another one clatter off the metal filing cabinet by my desk.

  From my pocket, I snatch the half-eaten bag of peanut M&M’s left from my morning snack, stuff it into Lil’ Ray’s hand, and say, “Eat this.”

  I stand up just in time to see a red plastic ruler shoot through the half-open door.

  “That is it!” I’ve said this at least two dozen times today. Apparently, I don’t mean it, because I’m still here, in this outer realm of Dante’s inferno. Just trying to survive Day One. Either it’s mere stubbornness or a desperate need to succeed at something, but I start retrieving copies of Animal Farm from the floor and slamming them onto desks.

  “What’re we s’posed to do with these?” That complaint comes from the right side of the room.

  “Open it. Look it over. Get out a piece of paper. Write a sentence telling me what you think the book is about.”

  “We got eight minutes till the bell,” a punk-rocker girl with a blue-streaked Mohawk notes.

  “Then hurry.”

  “You crazy?”

  “There ain’t time.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I ain’t writin’ no sentence.”

  “I’m not readin’ no book. This’s got…one-hun’erd forty-four pages! I can’t read that in fiv…four minutes.”

  “I didn’t ask you to read it. I asked you to look at it. Decide what you think it’s about and write a sentence. With that sentence, you will buy your passage through my classroom door and the privilege of proceeding on to lunch.” I move to the exit, where I’m just now noticing that Lil’ Ray has disappeared, leaving the empty M&M’s wrapper as a thank-you.

  “Lil’ Ray didn’t write no sentence. He got to go to lunch.”

  “That’s not your problem.” I stare them down and remind myself that these are ninth graders. Fourteen-and-fifteen-year-olds. They can’t hurt me.

  Much.

  Papers rattle. Pens smack desktops. Backpacks are zipped open.

  “I don’t have no paper,” the skinny boy protests.

  “Borrow some.”

  He reaches over and snatches a blank sheet
off a nerd’s desk. The victim sighs, reopens his backpack, and calmly gets out another piece. Thank God for nerds. I wish I had an entire classroom full. All day.

  In the end, I win, sort of. I’m presented with rumpled papers and copious amounts of attitude when the bell rings and kids storm the door. It’s not until the last group is draining the funnel I’ve created by combining my body and an empty desk that I recognize long, thin braids tipped with red beads, acid-washed jeans, and a color-block shirt. The girl who walked the little lunch box kid away from the intersection this morning. In all the chaos, I never even picked up on the fact that she was in my room.

  For an instant, I foster the notion that she hasn’t connected me with the near-miss crosswalk incident. Then I flip back through the last few papers on my stack, read sentences like:

  I think it’s about a farm.

  i bet this book stooped.

  About a pig.

  It’s about George Orwell’s satire of Russian society.

  Somebody actually copied the summary from the back cover. There’s hope.

  And then, It’s about a crazy lady who gets in a accident in the morning and hits her head. She wanders off into a school, but she’s got no clue what she’s doing there.

  Next day, she wakes up and don’t come back.

  CHAPTER 3

  HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875

  I mash the big field hat down hard to hide my face while I slide from shadow to shadow in the morning dark. It’ll be trouble if I get seen here. Both me and Tati know that. Old Missus won’t let no croppers near the Grand House till Seddie lights the morning lamp in the window. I get caught here at night, she’ll say I come thieving.

  It’ll give her cause to tear up our land paper. She don’t like the sharecrop contracts and hates ours more than most. Missus’s plan was to keep all us stray children and work us for free round the Grand House till we got too old to put up with it. Only reason she let Tati take us to her sharecrop land was because Old Mister said that Tati and us strays oughta have the chance at working our own plot, too. And because Missus never thought that one old freedwoman and seven half-growed kids could make it, farming on shares for ten years to earn our land, free and clear. It’s a lean, hungry life when three of every four eggs, bushels, barrels, and beans you draw from the field go right back to pay the debt for the land and goods at the plantation store, since croppers ain’t allowed to trade anyplace else. But that thirty acres is nearly ours, now. Thirty acres, a mule and outfit. Old Missus can’t stand the fact of it. Our land sits too close to the Grand House, for one thing. She wants to hold the land for Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, even though they got more interest in spending their daddy’s money than in farming fields.